


The Slowest Penny

by helsinkibaby



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, Community: 1-million-words, F/M, Het, Rare Pair, Romance, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 08:36:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7677529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helsinkibaby/pseuds/helsinkibaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Is that what I think it is?" Cisco makes a discovery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Slowest Penny

**Author's Note:**

> For the one million words give me a letter prompt - the letter was P

"Oh. My. God."

Having thought she was alone in the lab, Caitlin froze as she heard the voice behind her. Only for a split second though, springing into action and shutting off the image on her computer screen, the image changing in an instant to a dull and bland wallpaper that Cisco kept on insisting was a crime against pixels. Except that she had a feeling that it was too late for that and when she spun around, met Cisco's wide eyes, she knew it for sure. 

"Oh. My. God." He said it again in the same tone, surprise and joy and suspicion all warring for supremacy in his voice. "Is that what I think it was?" One index finger pointed at the screen, the other was clenched in a fist at his mouth. He was either thinking very hard or keeping back a shriek of joy; Caitlin found herself praying very hard it was the former. 

"Cisco-" she began, but he didn't let her get any further. 

"Was that a sonogram picture?" One look at her face told him the truth and a beaming smile crossed his face. He actually bounced up and down on his toes too. "Oh my God, Iris is pregnant? Does Barry know? No, scratch that, he can't know, no way he'd be able to keep this a secret, he'd be a walking smile." 

"Cisco-"

He blinked as if something had just occurred to him. "She's telling him, right? Like right now? Because I don't know how I could look at him and not-"

"Cisco." A firmer tone, what he usually called her schoolmarm voice, it did the trick. He blinked again and this time he actually listened to what she was saying. "It's not Iris's sonogram."

His eyes grew so wide that she thought they might actually fall out of his head. Which she knew was medically impossible, but hey, she'd seen a lot of weird stuff around STAR Labs. "Jesse?" he breathed. "Oh man, it's a good job Wally's got those powers otherwise he wouldn't be able to run far enough when Harry finds out..." He frowned, probably something to do with the look on her face. "What?" 

She shook her head, heart pounding, stomach churning. "It's not Jesse's either." 

"But..." Cisco's frown deepened and his finger ticked from one side to the other as he worked it out. "If it's not Iris and it's not Jesse, then..." The penny, possibly the slowest on record, dropped, along with his jaw. "Oh. My God." 

Any sense of joy or suspicion was long gone. This was straight up shock she was seeing on his face. Her stomach tightened and she fought the urge to throw up. Whatever she'd been expecting when telling people, not that she'd exactly had long to think about it, it wasn't this. "Yes." Her voice was tight, her voice brittle and she was about to walk out of the room when a high pitched, shrill noise made her wince. 

It took her a good two seconds to realise that the noise was coming from Cisco, two seconds more to realise that he was smiling, and one more after that to figure out that he was making that noise because he couldn't actually speak. He could, however, pull her into a hug and he did exactly that, almost lifting her off her feet with the force of it. 

"This is so great!" His voice was loud as he put her down, carrying all the way around the lab and she frowned, in case someone heard him. He misinterpreted it however, holding up his hands in apology. "Sorry, did I hurt you? I didn't mean to hurt you. Or Junior in there." He actually leaned down, his face level with her belly. "Hey Junior, sorry about that, won't happen again." He straightened as she was trying to figure out whether she should laugh or cry and when he saw the look on her face, he took both his hands in hers. "Oh shoot, don't cry. Is this hormones? Because it could be hormones. I would like it if it were hormones because then it's not me, making you cry..."

"Cisco, stop." Not quite the schoolmarm voice but it still did the job. "And keep your voice down." 

"Keep my-" To his credit, he got it quickly. "You mean-"

"No-one knows," she told him quietly. "I only found out myself for sure today." She glanced at her computer screen but didn't call back up the image. It was imprinted on her mind anyway. "And I don't know how Jo-" 

She stopped talking when she heard footsteps coming down the corridor, footsteps that she recognised. She froze, stared at the door and sure enough, Joe walked in, his face brightening when he saw her standing there. "Hey, there you are..." He stopped, looked at her, looked at Cisco, looked at the way they were standing. "Everything ok?" 

"Sure." Caitlin tried to keep her voice bright and breezy but from the way his eyes narrowed, she knew she hadn't fooled him in the slightest. "I didn't expect to see you here..." 

"I got my paperwork finished early, you weren't answering your phone..." Cisco dropped her hands, possibly hearing the concern in Joe's voice rising with every other word. "Are you sure everything's ok?" 

Cisco took a giant step back. "Well, I am beat." He yawned theatrically, exaggeratedly, absurdly. "Night!" And then he was gone, moving at a speed to rival even Barry. 

Caitlin watched him go, then turned her attention back to Joe, who now wasn't even trying to hide the worry on his face. "What?" The word was gentle, as was the hand on her shoulder and slowly, carefully, she moved her hand to her computer, called back up the picture. 

"This." 

It took him a moment to realise what he was looking at and when he did, his jaw dropped. "Is that-" He pointed at the image too, just as Cisco had, turned a gaze on her that was in no way suspicious, a little surprised but mostly overjoyed. For a brief moment, her heart soared, only to come crashing to Earth with his next question. "I'm gonna be a grandpa?" 

The words hung between them for a long moment and tears stung her eyes as she breathed one simple word that had the power to tear her world apart. 

"No."

"No?" His frown was back and he swung his gaze to the screen again, even leaning in for a better look.  "But that's..."

"Not Iris's," she said, echoing Cisco's line of thought. "Or Jesse's." 

She didn't take her eyes off him so she saw the exact moment that the realisation hit him, that the knowledge straightened his back, stiffened his shoulders. His head turned towards her as if in slow motion, his jaw slightly agape, his eyes wide. 

"You?" 

Her hands were trembling and she joined them together in an effort to hide it. "Me." Her lips quivered too and she pressed them together hard, counting the seconds by the pounding of her heart. 

"I thought..." His hand went to his lips, moved up over his face and hair, came to rest on the back of his neck, his face still slack with shock. "We were being careful."

"Yes." It was all she could say aloud, although in her head she was reeling off statistics that proved that nothing was one hundred percent reliable except abstinence and they certainly hadn't been practising that. 

He didn't say anything, just stared at the screen and eventually, the silence was too much and she heard herself saying, "Look, I know this is a lot to take in and you obviously need time to think about it, so I'll just..." 

"Think about it?" His gaze swung back to her so quickly that she thought he might have wrenched something in his neck. "Think about what?" 

She swallowed hard. "I know that this is a shock and not something you were thinking about..." 

"And you were?" He took a step towards her and she shook her head quickly. 

"No! But if you want... if you don't want..." Her throat seized up and she had to look down, blinking furiously to stop her tears from falling. 

"Caitlin." He was standing in front of her and the way he said her name made her think that he'd been listening to her when she deployed her schoolmarm voice with Cisco.  She looked up at him, his face swimming with her tears and his hands cupped her cheeks, thumbs wiping away the tears before they had a chance to fall. "I want," he told her, one hand sliding down from her cheek to rest against her stomach. "I definitely want." 

Relief rendered her breathless and she swayed against him, letting her head fall onto his shoulder. "I was afraid," she whispered, not looking up at him, "that you'd be upset... I mean, we weren't expecting..."

"Sweetheart, there's a whole lot in my life I haven't expected," he told her and his voice was as warm as his smile when he pulled back, lifted her head so that she was looking up at him. "Never been disappointed yet." The way he looked at her told her that she was one of the things he was talking about; the way he kissed her removed any doubt. 

When he pulled away, she was breathless for another reason entirely. Still though, for once, he didn't only have eyes for her, because he was looking back at her computer screen again. "So tell me," he said, "what exactly am I looking at?" 

Tears in her eyes, a smile on her face, she projected the image onto the big screen and did exactly that. 


End file.
